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Rally Software

Rally Software
Formerly CA Agile Central

Overview

What is Rally Software?

Rally Software headquartered in Boulder, Colorado developed the Rally agile software development / ALM platform which was acquired by CA Technologies and rebranded as CA Agile Central. After CA's acquisition by Broadcom the software was once again rebranded as Rally.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Powerful Agile DevOps Planning and Tracking: Many reviewers have found Rally to be a powerful tool for agile DevOps planning and tracking. …
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Review of Rally

7 out of 10
February 01, 2018
Incentivized
It is used by multiple departments across the organization. It helps us to streamline and in the functioning of multiple projects running …
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Love Rally!

10 out of 10
October 25, 2017
Incentivized
Our Product and Engineering teams rely solely on CA Agile Central for all aspects of our Application Lifecycle Management. We coordinate …
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Pricing

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What is Rally Software?

Rally Software headquartered in Boulder, Colorado developed the Rally agile software development / ALM platform which was acquired by CA Technologies and rebranded as CA Agile Central. After CA's acquisition by Broadcom the software was once again rebranded as Rally.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Jira Software?

JIRA Software is an application lifecycle management solution for software development teams. It allows users to create, prioritize and track the progress of tasks across multiple team members, and offers a wide range of integrations. It is offered via the cloud and local servers.

What is Wrike?

Wrike is a project management and collaboration software. This solution connects tasks, discussions, and emails to the user’s project plan. Wrike is optimized for agile workflows and aims to help resolve data silos, poor visibility into work status, and missed deadlines and project failures.

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Product Demos

Daptiv Project Portfolio Management Software and Rally Integration Demo

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Product Details

Rally Software Competitors

Rally Software Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Rally Software headquartered in Boulder, Colorado developed the Rally agile software development / ALM platform which was acquired by CA Technologies and rebranded as CA Agile Central. After CA's acquisition by Broadcom the software was once again rebranded as Rally.

Digital.ai TeamForge, IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management, and PTC Windchill RV&S are common alternatives for Rally Software.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 7.6.

The most common users of Rally Software are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(121)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Powerful Agile DevOps Planning and Tracking: Many reviewers have found Rally to be a powerful tool for agile DevOps planning and tracking. It provides rapid visibility of progress or problems across a large number of teams, allowing users to effectively manage and prioritize tasks.

Portfolio View for Clear Visibility: Reviewers appreciate the portfolio view feature of Rally, as it allows product management to have clear visibility across all their product features. This feature helps in effectively managing and prioritizing tasks by providing a comprehensive overview of the project's progress.

Strong Feedback Metrics for Task Tracking: Users have mentioned that Rally provides strong feedback metrics for both teams and individuals. This feature helps in tracking the status of tasks and ensuring that commitments are being met, contributing to efficient task management.

Difficult to Use Without Training: Many users have expressed frustration with the software's steep learning curve, stating that it is difficult to use without any training or guidance. They find it almost impossible to know how to complete their daily tasks effectively.

Insufficient Online Documentation: Some users have reported a lack of free online documentation available to help them navigate the software. This absence makes it challenging for them to find the information they need and leaves them feeling unsupported.

Overly Complicated User Interface: Several reviewers have mentioned that certain views of the user interface are overly complicated, causing confusion and hindering their ability to perform tasks efficiently. Users suggest simplifying these interfaces would greatly enhance their overall experience with the software.

Users highly recommend CA Agile Central for enterprise product management, highlighting its usefulness in running Agile projects and implementing Agile methodology. It is considered a one-stop tool for project management, reporting, and email notifications. Users suggest sticking with CA Agile Central and utilizing the features that work best for each team, as well as giving it some time to get used to without adapting it too much to the organization.

Reviewers recommend Rally Software over Atlassian Jira, finding it more intuitive and easier to use. They praise Rally as a comprehensive solution for Agile teams, automating the entire Agile practice. Rally is particularly recommended for organizations planning to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework Methodology (SAFe). However, users suggest checking out Jira for more add-ons and cheaper options but still highly recommend Rally over Jira.

Users suggest considering other project/product management tools before making a decision about CA Agile Central's future availability due to recent acquisition concerns. They also recommend thoroughly testing other options in the market that provide similar functionality at a lower cost. Additionally, users highlight that CA Agile Central is well-suited for large organizations and recommend having at least one person familiar with the software for a smoother transition. They also suggest using Assembla instead of CA Agile Central as an alternative option.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Evgueny Lemasov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
On our projects, the distribution we use JIRA about 50% of the time, Rally 45%, and Microsoft TFS 5%. The choice depends on the different project features. I have personally used Rally Software and JIRA since 2009 and I would advise using Rally if you have serious budget requirements/restrictions for the project, you have a team of 5 to 20 developers (or several teams), and you know the release date.

The main advantage of the Rally is that on any day of the iteration, you know how many hours are in the "TO DO" column. Moreover, the fact that UI/UX of Rally is in a tabular form makes using this tool convenient for all project participants - from programmers, QA people and Scrum master to Product Owners and C level guys. You see all the important information on one page and you do not need to scroll.
  • Easy to set up, plan and estimate user stories.
  • Easy track hours and update "to do" hours.
  • Iteration Burn Down report is the best.
  • Project development process is standard for all teams and customers.
  • Rally Software monthly price for user is a little bit expensive.
  • It is a little bit hard to set up relation between Epic stories vs Child US.
  • Search by text is hard when you have a 2-3 year old project.
It is perfect when:
  • You need to track and improve velocity
  • You have a budget and you must control time
  • Requirements are changing often
  • Requirements are changing in the middle of the iteration
  • You have to organize the work of developers and QA simultaneously
  • Rally Software allows us to understand what was done and how much time & labor was in every task of your project.
From my point of view It is more convenient than other PM tools. You see a lot on one screen without scrolling and can easily understand where you have problems on your project
Never had any problems.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Rally is being used across my entire organization. Initiatives are codified as Epics and Features in Rally, and the company collects metrics on the progress of these initiatives. The metrics are also used within teams to track velocity and performance over time.
  • Organizes work into well-defined structures
  • Allows useful metrics to be collected
  • Is very customizable depending on what each team member wants to see
  • Has a wealth of features and can be used in many ways, depending on the organization's needs and desires
  • The user interface is slightly "clunky"
  • It is easy to overwrite others' changes if you haven't refreshed your page in a while, since updates do not happen automatically
  • For my team's needs, there are way too many features and fields and it can be confusing to dig through that to find the subset we use
I would imagine that Rally is fantastic from the perspective of someone overseeing a large organization. Having everyone on the same feature-rich tool means that every team can customize it (to a degree) for their needs while still providing useful metrics upward. However, for small organizations or single teams, it is probably overkill.
  • It lets our scrum master collect monthly metrics for our team, which we use to adapt our practices to be more efficient
  • It organizes the organization's initiatives nicely, and allows easy conversation based on the epic/feature code
  • It slightly slows down and frustrates the development team I'm on, due to the cons I already mentioned
I did not select Rally; it was chosen by the organization. If I were choosing what to use within my own team, I would use Trello. It's free, very simple to use, and has a much nicer user interface. My company previously used VersionOne however, and I prefer Rally over that solution.
It is adaptable and can be tailored to fit a team's way of working, but because it's so extensible, it can be confusing to use. I don't know what the experience was like for the organization when it was being implemented originally, so I can only speak for my team.
Rally is very usable, once you get used to it. My coworkers and I have learned which fields and features our team uses, and have conditioned ourselves to scroll past and ignore the rest. At first, it was intimidating, but the workflow gets easier over time.
Henry PAN | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
To specify the same details put in a traditional use case, I use the predecessor/successor relationships on user stories to track dependencies. I use the “Ready” option on the board to indicate completion of an activity. I adjust permissions for those projects to ensure limited access to requirements in different phases. When a phase is complete, I bulk move the stories into the next phase.
  • Agile
  • DevOps
  • Planning
  • Tracking
  • Action
  • Context Driven Testing
  • Level 1 production support
  • Vertical in healthcare
DevOps for agile environment is a better fit. It is less about who does it, and more about the code meets the acceptance criteria. Companies often have specific lead times, hence release planning is helpful. Rally Software is very well suited to a deployment environment and in some scenarios which should consist of a QA person as well as BA, developer and operations working together.
  • ROI is cool
  • Agile is great
  • DevOps is the best fit
I've also evaluated the following agile solutions: ActiveCollab, Agile Bench, Agilo for Scrum, Atlassian JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, SpringGround, Targetprocess. Telerik Teamprocess, VersionOne, ZebraPlan etc.
If it’s time to transition to software that’s specific to your Agile needs, check out some of these options for your team’s communication, reporting, and assessment requirements. Once you find a better tool set, your projects will be within the deadline.
58
The team represent:
  • HIPAA regulations compliance
  • Migration to new EMR/EPIC
  • Risk analysis and testing
  • Meaningful use reimbursement
  • ICD-10 clinical coding for billing standards
  • Infrastructure support (managed services platform)
  • Interfacing with HL7 files
  • Virtualization on server & storage
  • Data storage and security
  • Remote desktop & VDI
  • Thin clients & Think clients
  • Interoperability solutions
  • Secure and remote accessibility
  • Mobile device integration
  • Backup & Storage
  • Healthcare Intelligence
  • Tech Service Org
20
I see the top skill set includes:
  1. The Scaled Agile Framework®, or SAFe®, provides a recipe for adopting Agile at enterprise scale.

As Scrum is to the Agile team, SAFe is to the Agile enterprise.

  1. SAFe tackles the tough issues – architecture, integration, funding, governance and roles at scale. It is field-tested and enterprise-friendly.
  2. SAFe is the brainchild As Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are to Scrum, Dean Leffingwell is to SAFe.
  1. SAFe is based on Lean and Agile principles.
  2. There are three levels in SAFe:
    * Team
    * Program
    * Portfolio

At the Team Level:

  1. Scrum with XP engineering practices are used.
  2. Define/Build/Test (DBT) teams deliver working, fully tested software every two weeks. There are five to nine members of each team.
  3. Rally’s weekly webnar covers the basic practices at the team level.

At the Program Level:

  1. SAFe defines an Agile Release Train (ART). As iteration is to team, train is to program.
  2. The ART (or train) is the primary vehicle for value delivery at the program level. It delivers a value stream for the organization.
  • EPIC localization
  • OnBase upgrade
  • UCS swap
  • Pure replacement
  • Internal sale diffcult
  • Budget fight
  • License upgrade
  • Push to other group
  • Expand to infrastructure team
  • Get more project swap to agile
  • To keep connecting my people, platform, and process for faster, smarter, better results.
  • Making the right contribution to the community. Use Agile and Lean processes to manage the work of your team.
  • Once you have tasted the positive result with Rally Software, you don't want to give up and come back to the old school of development pain any more.
Yes
TargetProcess got replaced since it can take some initial time to get to know the tool, there is a learning curve. But it's worth it! takes a while to load on the first use - requires an initial training session to understand all concepts. It is expensive compared to other solutions.

What I dislike the most is that the experience isn't consistent - some data types can be created, renamed and tweaked extensively, while some others are set in stone and baked into the system. I would rather have that it was very scaled down, and that you could create your own data types for cards, instead of having a few baked-in types (Epic, Feature, UserStory, Request, Bug etc). And the cards are tied to metadata such as Release, Project, User, Role, Effort etc., - these cannot be modified and you cannot use them as you wish. You cannot rename card types or create more, delete unused types etc. You have to choose between points or hours as effort metric - but they don't work the same! Some features are not available when you choose points instead of hours. I'd rather it was only a label choosing "p" instead of "h". Multiple things like the above - some stuff is built-in and can't be changed and it can be very confusing. The API is a mess. Everything can be modified in every request, instead of having separate requests for modifying different objects. For instance: you add a comment to a bug, you have to include the user (as an object, not just an id) that authored the comment. However, if you accidentally input the wrong name for the user (but the correct ID), it will actually *change the name* of that user. WTF? The query language is very useful, but has some subtle bugs and inconsistencies.
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
  • Third-party Reviews
Software applications are changing the world, disrupting established business models and bringing in completely new experiences in areas from travel to banking. In order to compete, businesses need to develop high quality software quickly and reliably. Rally is a leading provider of Agile development software and services, with offerings that complement and expand our strengths in the areas of DevOps and Management Cloud. Every developer dreams of creating truly transformative software that responds to a business challenge extremely quickly. Joining forces with Rally makes this dream a possibility for millions of developers worldwide, and in turn opens up the possibility of a whole new range of experiences driven by software. At the end of the day, this deal is about enabling speed and flexibility, about how we can make the most demanding enterprises truly agile.
The current proof of concept & pilot took too long to finish. How can I make sure my substantial software purchase won't leave me sore into project management, getting company buy-in and change management.
To focusing on the process of evaluating and purchasing software once my needs changed.
I might rule out a vendor or two based on what the RFP response tells me.
Time is money & I need to get the job done quick.
  • Vendor implemented
No
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
Due to our production environment is 24x7x365, so any change has to go through a tough change control approve process which took a lot of our time to get Rally implemented. To prevent down time from happening, each implement has to provide detail action plan step by step to make sure even the most Jr. member could get the job done.
  • Planning
  • Change control
  • Compatibility
Implementation of RALLY services and program satisfaction among various group,... 1) Dev Outcomes: How were our resiliencies, development, learning & practitioners “make them do the work,” but that they ask you to do it “in a way like before.
2) The Ops group: Just wish to make sure any change won't break current production envirements
All the stake holders has to be on the same page


Yes
I get expert help for Rally--wherever I need. You get complete software diagnosis to get to the root cause of your issue, with the premier support option for Rally suites and applications.
Dedicated attention. The Answer Tech will work with me one-on-one to make sure my software issues are resolved. Help from the comfort of my home. I can stay comfortable in my home or office while my Answer Tech works on my computer remotely.
Get peace of mind for an entire year with the premiere support. Receive one year of unlimited personal one-on-one online training sessions and software support from Rally experts via online chat, phone or in-store. Answer Desk experts will keep my software performing at its best, eliminate bugs, and get me the answers I need, fast all year long. It connects me with friendly and knowledgeable Answer Techs who know Rally software better than anyone.
No
Once I was running into a tough epic performance issue and luckily I got talk to David Adiiutori who helped me work on the issue until it was fully improved. He is also helped me tap into Rally's passionate network of customers and Rally experts who are ready to answer any of my toughest questions.
  • Tracking
  • Kanban
  • Update
  • Team work
  • Trouble shooting
  • Swap
  • Down gred
Yes, but I don't use it
When we started with Scrum at Rally years ago, we used to just do a design meeting every few weeks with a couple of key stakeholders to talk about what was coming up and prepare the backlog. This worked relatively well, but as we added more discipline to our release cycle, the ad-hoc backlog planning our product owners were used to, started to break.

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Gives you a good view into your current active work week/ active sprint
  • Provides a pretty good way to look at prior sprints
  • It has so much flexibility and power that it actually makes simpler tasks complex – particularly backlog management and scheduling things into releases and sprints.
  • It has a tough job of managing “epics” – things with 100s of small features, and being able to prioritize across them. Typically we have 2 epics in a release. We have no problem prioritizing epics, but it is hard to prioritize “stories” across epics. There are typically dozens of stories in an epic.
  • It works - we have been able to get the job done. We could probably be doing better with something else.
  • It helps us manage sprints, tie into auditing.
Assuming we were paying - right now my group gets it for free as the broader engineering organization pays for it. There would be switching costs. There would be pretty minimal data migration, but the biggest cost is getting people to learn a new tool and starting off on the right footing. Evaluation and identification of the right product is a big part of switching too.
Our core engineering team in our division pays for the application. As a company, we pay $35 / month per person for the Enterprise Edition. In my team, we are living with it because it’s free to us. If I were to evaluate new tools, I would look at Pivotal Tracker again, and also have a look at Altasian. They have a big product suite that some of the team has used before.
70
Software Engineering
1
One person in our division is the main POC for Rally. In our team, we do everything internally – minimal assistance is required.
  • Track what we are doing from sprint to sprint
  • Track velocity/progress
  • Provides audit trail as we complete work. We can tie the loop off on what code actually changed. This important for SSAE16 compliance.
  • We found that the plug-ins offered some nice drag-and-drop functionality when review story status
  • We are considering integrating our Ideas board so it will feed directly into Rally
Pivotal Tracker
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
We would have spent more time in a pilot mode. It would have been helpful to have a single team trial it exhaustively to determine if it was a good fit.
  • Implemented in-house
We just got access and started creating projects. There is no formal implementation. If you have different products/teams – it’s good to separate them out. There are many levels at which you can differentiate structure- custom fields, field values. You need to think through how common are your projects vs. how different and implement categories at appropriate level based upon that. Make good use of tags on stories so you can group them together. You can tag features too. There are different ways to get different views into the data. You really need to think those through.
  • Online training
It more or less confirmed that we are using it the way they had in mind. We were hoping for a epiphany in terms of how we could use it better. They also want to be a go to source for agile processes and have an online resource center. It’s not that great but had a couple of nuggets. It hasn’t really helped us too much and we are not too far off from the classical interpretation of agile. I would recommend training, in particular for organizations that multiple on-going projects. The product seems optimized for larger, more complex teams and getting proper training on how to configure, administer and use the system would be beneficial.
It seems a little needlessly complex
Keep it simple. While it's tempting to add lots of custom fields it becomes difficult to maintain consistent usage across a large team. Consequently the data become unreliable.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
Some - we have added small pieces of custom code
We added some pre-built plugins. It was easy to do. Based on the plug-ins we saw we wouldn't have spent the time customizing it ourself.
The hook into Subversion didn't seem fully supported, although it did work. Made us wonder if it would break at a later date due to Rally upgrades.
No
Never used it. Have just used online help.
No
  • It was very difficult to manage epics and their child stories.
  • Scheduling of stories into sprints was never as easy as I expected it to be
We are trying to plan iterations where you pull stories off a backlog and into a sprint. There’s a screen which looks like it’s supposed to represent where you’d plan all your iterations. We have not been able to get the system to display what we want for inclusion, and we are technical. There are situations where people cannot see certain stories. It’s confounding. Sometimes its because of permissions, but other times it happens for bizarre reasons. We’ve had to delete and recreate stories in order for them to show-up. It’s either buggy, or the nature of its configurability makes it more complex than it needs to be.
Don’t recall ever being unavailable.
The screens render relatively quickly but many actions that you would expect to require a single click require multiple clicks and pop-up windows. The extra windows and clicks make the product feel ponderous.
  • Subversion version control system.
Integration to Subversion required a custom module script to be installed. It shows that the check in of the code was prompted by the story. Rally provides a proof of concept/ reference implementation, but the team had to implement it. It is not as bad as it looks. I thought it would be hard.
  • Not at this time
I was not involved in negotiating terms
Yes
Yes, Rally lived up to the SaaS standard of carefree upgrades
No
No
Gary Allison | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Rapid visibility of progress or problems across large number of teams.
  • Portfolio view allows Product Management clear visibility across all their product features.
  • Strong feedback metrics for the team and individuals as to status and meeting commitments.
  • Visual UI quickly gives teams visibility into their sprint progress.
  • Helps enables Agile structure for widely dispersed teams.
  • Supports traditional scrum and also Kanban.
  • Completely open API give access to just about everything and enables integration to other systems you may be using.
  • Team at Rally is very responsive to needs and feedback. They also have a strong SE team to help with best practices. Pretty easy to get one of their Product Managers on the phone to talk roadmap.
  • Strong community to help with questions and their forums are very active.
  • Traditional Agile metrics like sprint velocity and burndown are built in, but still challenging to get metrics beyond these.
  • Not an inexpensive solution.
  • The visibility Rally gives into the actual development activities is phenomenal - for the team themselves as well as management. No need to have big project review meetings - the data is all right there.
  • The product is fairly easy to use, which means that the development teams actually use it, as a result they build better sprint plans and are more likely to deliver what was intended by the Product Manager.
  • I don't know how you measure precisely the ROI from greater predictability, but it is clearly high. When used with other solid planning processes, the visibility Rally offers can give you much greater predictability of a given team's future performance and of the entire organization as a whole.
  • Rally facilitates significant improvements in communication between Product Management and Engineering because it offers visibility and clear connections between business initiatives and individual user stories that the team is delivering.
  • Continual improvements in the tool delivered by Rally
  • Tight integration with our Agile processes
  • Rally still the best tool in this market
Their pricing structure is pretty flat - you get lower per seat prices with more seats obviously. Buying at end of quarter will sometimes get you a little better price, but not huge savings. Sometime in the past, I was able to get a discount for being a reference, but now that they have grown and are gaining in market position, this is probably less the case. I have found them extremely easy to work with overall. Never had a problem.
  • Viewing team and individual status is very easy in the Team status or Iteration status menus.
  • A complete view of all features is visible in the Portfolio Items page.
  • Burndown charts are right there at the top of every iteration page.
  • The landing page has a completely customizable dashboard where each user can add their own apps, reports, lists, etc. Very cool.
  • Complete integration available for Eclipse so you can update your task hours right in the IDE.
  • If there is a metric not visible in a plug in app or report, then you may have to resort to the API which can be heavy lifting.
Yes, but I don't use it
Great UI, recent refresh was terrific. Great graphs and metrics, inline editing for updates, and a multitude of views on sprint progress make for a great team collaboration experience. There is also an active community and forums so that if you do need help, it is readily available.
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